GO-TO, GUY: Marian Gaborik needs to regain his swagger if the Rangers are going to upset the top-seeded Capitals in their first-round playoff series, Larry Brooks says.Getty Imagtes

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There are always paral lel, if at times contradictory, theories at work in the playoffs, one being that a team cannot succeed in a seven-game series without significant contributions from depth players, the other holding that a team cannot succeed without its top players leading the way.

Both concepts apply to the Rangers as they prepare to face the powerful, No. 1-seed Caps, beginning with the first two games in D.C. this week before the series shifts to the Garden next weekend.

The team that won 44 games, earned 93 points and made the playoffs primarily because of an all-for-one mentality that created a unit greater than the sum of its parts won’t get by without contributions from the supporting cast and won’t succeed if coach John Tortorella only trusts eight or nine forwards and four defensemen to get the job done.

Similarly, the chance of an upset — and that’s what victory surely would be against this Washington team in search of a Stanley Cup that pounded down the stretch 16-2-1 — is dependent upon Henrik Lundqvist and Marian Gaborik operating at peak performance levels. And no one has the slightest concern about The King.

The spotlight is on Gaborik, who is coming off a wretched season and an inadequate stretch drive during which he failed to score in the final eight games and was benched in the third period in four of the nine games leading up to Saturday’s victory over the Devils.

Gaborik may not like being singled out and he may not be comfortable on center stage, but his $7.5 million a year contract doesn’t afford him the luxury of opting out.

Money doesn’t make the player, and we all understand that. Players don’t sign themselves to contracts, and we all understand that, too.

But there’s a reason a team invests $37.5 million in a player over five years, as the Rangers did with Gaborik when he became a free agent two summers ago, and it’s not just to have the athlete get hat tricks in the winter against Edmonton, Toronto and the Islanders.

This is time for which Gaborik was hired. And if the Rangers are going to pull this off, they will need Gaborik — who who had 22 points (12-10) in 29 playoff games for the Wild but was held to just a single assist in Minnesota’s 2008 six-game first-round defeat by Colorado — to locate his confidence in his shot and in his game. Perhaps they are one and the same.

The Rangers might get by if Gaborik merely holds his own at even strength, but they desperately need him to produce on the power play. They need him to move and to find open spaces. They need him to win battles for the puck with the man advantage, but most of all they need him to get his shot through, an act that should be as natural for him as combing his hair but one that’s become more and more of a challenge through one double clutch after another that doesn’t hit the net.

There’s no question Bryan McCabe has been an improvement at the point, but the numbers do not show it, the club’s 16.9 percent efficiency with him essentially the same as its 16.2 percent performance before the defenseman was acquired from Florida on Feb. 26.

But so much of that falls on Gaborik, who scored a total of seven power-play goals this season, half his total from last year.

So much of the Rangers’ chance to take out the Caps falls on Gaborik. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks.